It is generally considered a rare occurrence these days to find a person who does not own or have access to a communications terminal, such as a telephone, portable digital assistant (PDA), or computer. In fact, many people use multiple communications terminals to communicate and to conduct their daily business. Considering telephones as an example, a person may use a personal mobile phone as well as a wireline home phone, a wireline office phone, and perhaps even a mobile office phone. Although these phones may be located in different places, a person can generally only be in one place at a time. As a result, important calls designated for a particular telephone may be relegated to a thirty-second message on an answering machine, or missed all together, if the person is not there to take the call.
To address this issue, some people forward calls from one communications terminal to another. For example, when an employee is not in his office to receive a call on his work phone, his assistant may be able to manually forward the call to the employee's mobile or home phone number. Similarly, the person may manually accomplish such call forwarding himself by dialing a star code (such as *72) to activate call forwarding and may enter the ten-digit telephone number to specify the phone to which he would like the calls forwarded. If call forwarding is no longer needed, the person may deactivate the service by dialing another star code (such as *73).
However, such approaches to call forwarding require an action by the user or the user's delegate to activate and deactivate the call forwarding feature. The user must therefore spend time activating the feature, such as by dialing the star code or informing his assistant to forward his calls. Furthermore, the user may forget to take the steps necessary to activate or deactivate call forwarding. As a result, he may miss important calls that are not forwarded to his location, or he may miss calls because he neglected to deactivate call forwarding. In addition, forwarding calls from more than one phone may not even be possible.
Thus, there is a need for improved techniques to forward communications from one or more communications terminals to another communications terminal that reduce the obligations imposed upon the user to institute and to cancel the forwarding operations.